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CVPM Capstone

In this experiment, the objective is to find what the velocity of an object must be in order for it to reach any given point. In context, I created a soccer field and placed a cone at one point and the ball at another. In the diagram of the field, you can see that a right triangle can be formed from just the two points. Once the field was formed, I quantified the lengths of the X and Y coordinates, since the ball lies on a flat plane. Since the X position of the cone was -30m and the X position of ball was 50m, the total distance between these two points horizontally was 80m. For Y coordinates, the y-value of the cone was 5m and the y-value of the ball was 2m. Therefore, the total distance between these points vertically is 3m. From these x and y values, I calculated the velocity need by using the slope method of rise over run. 3m over 80m is 3/80(m/s); however, since the cone is located on a negative part of the grid for its X-value, the value of the distance the ball travels is negative. Therefore, instead of 3/80(m/s), the velocity will be negative, giving it a velocity of -3/80(m/s). The velocity doesn’t have to be -3/80(m/s), it just has to be proportional to 3/80m.

By finding the velocity of that the object must travel in order reach a certain point allows you to use any starting point and reach any unknown point wish to reach. When using VPython, the y coordinate isn’t used to measure the vertical shift of the object but rather its height on a 3-D plane. Altering the Z-coordinate is what substitutes for the up and down shift on the plane. However, on a flat plane like the diagram, the Y coordinate is what is used to change the vertical position of an object. Keep this in mind because it becomes very confusing if you don’t understand the correlation between a flat plane on a paper diagram and a 3-D plane on VPython.

In conclusion, from the ball’s starting position of (50,0,2)m, I discovered that the soccer ball’s velocity of -3/80(m/s) successfully arrived me at the position of the cone (-30,0,5)m in approximately 9.8s.